not follow that every parent contains these reservoirs, and that a continual close association with the parents is always beneficial to children.  If it did, we should have to prosecute everyone who employed a governess or sent away a little boy to a preparatory school.  And our real task is to establish a test that will gauge the desirability and benefit of a parent’s continued parentage.  There are certainly parents and homes from which the children might be taken with infinite benefit to themselves and to society, and whose union it is ridiculous to save from the divorce court shears.

Suppose, now, we made the willingness of a parent to give up his or her children the measure of his beneficialness to them.  There is no reason why we should restrict divorce only to the relation of husband and wife.  Let us broaden the word and make it conceivable for a husband or wife to divorce not only the partner, but the children.  Then it might be possible to meet the demands of the Shaw-esque extremist up to the point of permitting a married parent, who desired freedom, to petition for a divorce, not from his or her partner simply, but from his or her family, and even for a widow or widower to divorce a family.  Then would come the task of the assessors.  They would make arrangements for the dissolution of the relationship, erring from justice rather in the direction of liberality towards the divorced group, they would determine contributions, exact securities appoint trustees and guardians....  On the whole, I do not see why such a system should not work very well.  It would break up many loveless homes, quarrelling and bickering homes, and give a safety-valve for that hate which is the sinister shadow of love.  I do not think it would separate one child from one parent who was really worthy of its possession.

So far I have discussed only the possibility of divorce without offences, the sort of divorce that arises out of estrangement and incompatibilities.  But divorce, as it is known in most Christian countries, has a punitive element, and is obtained through the failure of one of the parties to observe the conditions of the bond and the determination of the other to exact suffering.  Divorce as it exists at present is not a readjustment but a revenge.  It is the nasty exposure of a private wrong.  In England a husband may divorce his wife for a single act of infidelity, and there can be little doubt that we are on the eve of an equalisation of the law in this respect.  I will confess I consider this an extreme concession to the passion of jealousy, and one likely to tear off the roof from many a family of innocent children.  Only infidelity leading to supposititious children in the case of the wife, or infidelity obstinately and offensively persisted in or endangering health in the case of the husband, really injure the home sufficiently to justify a divorce on the assumptions of our present argument.  If we are going to make the welfare of the children our criterion in these